


Echoes In The Darkness

by tielan



Category: Black Jewels - Anne Bishop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-14 08:09:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18048797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: The Priestess who listens was once a daughter who also escaped her family's expectations.





	Echoes In The Darkness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [maypop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/maypop/gifts).



It is the hour just after dawn, when the Sanctuary is still quiet, and the Priestess is having her morning coffee and toast. The day's work is ahead - the arrangement of a Birthright Ceremony in the spring, a consultation on the planning of a wedding for next summer, and an Offering to the Darkness come nightfall. In addition to this, there are the Wintersol celebrations of the local village, and she promised the Healer that she would collect mosses for poultices in exchange for a skin salve.

A visitor on the landing web summons her, spells rippling with the arrival, telling her a little of who comes.

Just one, light-Jewelled, and in haste but without fear.

These things matter.

The young witch waits confidently at the gates as  the Priestess goes down to unlatch them. She is dressed in simple homespun, but she waits with a comfortable grace, certain of being let in, and without any fear that she might be intruding.

Even before she gives her name and family, the Priestess guesses her to be an aristo - perhaps a scion of a lesser branch, but still with all the benefits that money and comfort can afford her. Yet she accepts tea rather than coffee, and a slice of toast that the Priestess offers, sitting down to a far simpler meal than she would be accustomed to in her mother's house. The reason becomes clear when the reason for her visit is broached.

"I married a workingman," she tells the Priestess. "He wears the Rose, but his heart is kind and generous. My family hoped for a more...political match for me, and tried to bend me to their will." She fingers her Purple Dusk jewel and smiles - a gloating satsifaction. "Needless to say, I had my way against them in the end - and my way with my husband. But now, I need help for the pregnancy. I no longer trust my family - while they appear reconciled since my husband and I have been formally handfast, my brother's ambitions outstrip both his competence and our competency. I dare not entrust them with myself and my child."

It is not an unfamiliar situation to the Priestess - not the specifics of the witch's family, but the scenario. The lesser branches of aristo families jostle for money and influence and power, trying to improve their fortunes and standings in their social circles. Jewelled daughters and sons are encouraged into Queen's courts, or else to marry well and lift the fortunes and profile of their families in the courts of Province and Territory Queens. It is a dance of Blood politics as old as the Blood itself. 

Of course, not all the sons and daughters are willing to be used by their families as markers to a greater social standing.

"I...during the pregnancy, I'll need someone to drain my Jewelled power regularly during the pregnancy. My husband has a lighter Jewel and can't do it. Are you...one of my neighbours suggested you. Are you willing?"

Dark eyes look across the table, content to wait for an answer. And the Priestess understands that what the young witch is asking is not if the Priestess is _able_ but whether she is willing to risk a schism with the aristo family over their wayward daughter's distrust of them.

Is she willing to risk a schism?

Long ago, a family decided that their Opal-Jewelled daughter was better used as a marriage piece than 'lost' to her family as a Sanctuary Priestess, and planned a marriage that the witch had no desire to undertake. She took what small earnings she could gather, and in the dark of the night, caught the winds to a local coaching station where a coach was due to travel to another Territory. Fleeing their influence and control, she apprenticed herself to the elderly Priestess of a Sanctuary far away, who took her on, seeing only a willing student, not an escaped aristo daughter.

It has been long decades since that young aristo fled her family, her marriage, and the expectations upon her, but she remembers what it felt to be free.

"I can do that," says the Priestess.

They arrange a weekly meeting, time and place and preparation.

"There's a Healer in your village," she notes. "I have a weekly arrangement with her to swap goods. If you wish to be more discreet in your visits, at least to begin with, then I can meet you there and the Healer can oversee us both. Would that suit?"

"Yes," says the young witch. "Thank you."

Then, with the witch's permission, the Priestess drains power from the young witch's Jewels, leaving only a little power in them. As time goes on, she will leave less and less - down to barely a droplet, enough that the witch might not be broken but not more. Leaving even a little power now will cause the young witch some discomfort, but they are not yet familiar and the new mother must also accustom herself to no longer having her Jewelled strength at her command.

It is a delicate business and one that takes time and trust.

During the recovery from the process, the Priestess serves tea and a cake that was left as payment for some other service, and they discuss other feminine details of life - a mother-to-be's hopes and dreams for her daughter or son, a discussion of the present District Queen's ruling court, the politics of the local villages. The young woman is good company, and the time flies faster than the Priestess realises, that when it comes time for the midday meal, she is sorry to see the young woman go.

To start with, the visit is once every few weeks. At the Purple Dusk, the young woman doesn't accumulate power as swiftly as one of the darker Jewels, so the need isn't so urgent. But as the pregnancy progresses and the months pass, the visits become more frequent - weekly, then, in the last month, nearly daily.

The young woman and her husband come to stay at the Sanctuary at the end. Unusual, but then, accomodations can be made, and the need is urgent. Her family have become pushy and demanding as the pregnancy progresses, and the Priestess doesn't mind the extension to her household.

When the babe's time comes, a Healer is called in, as is the Priestess from another Sanctuary and an acolyte from the training houses.

The birth is slow but without complications, and the daughter is born, hale and whole, and loudly protesting her entry into the world.

As she lays the babe into the mother's arms, the Priestess meets the young woman's gaze, feels the touch of trust and affection, and smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> I hadn't thought that much about the Priestesses and the part they played in Blood rituals before your request, so this was a great opportunity to develop some aspects of the world of the Blood.


End file.
